“Through his suffering, my servant shall justify many.” - The Parish ...

The Catholic Press Loses a
Friend 2011-10-23 by Ron Rolheiser, OMI
No community should botch its deaths! Those are
the words of the famed anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, and I
use them here to introduce a tribute to Otto Herschan, a long
-time Catholic publisher, who died on July 12 at the age of
84.
For many years he was the publisher and Managing
Director of a number of national Catholic weekly newspapers,
including the Catholic Herald in England, the Scottish
Catholic Observer in Scotland, and the Irish Catholic in
Ireland. He brought an interesting background to Catholic
journalism.
He was born in Austria and, at age 10, came to
England as refugee with his mother just before World War
II. His father, who put his wife and Otto on the Orient Express
bound for London just before he died, had been an
Austrian army officer and in the first chapters of Otto's autobiography,
Holy Smoke, he describes the trials of Catholicism
in Austria as it was passing into Nazi control.
Upon arriving in England, Otto was educated by
the Benedictines at their school in Herefordshire, Belmont
Abbey. After graduating, he worked briefly in accountancy
and advertising, before enrolling for a college degree, but
lack of funds obliged him to leave after a year. Otto then
turned his energy to the theater, joining the Boltons Theatre,
the best known of London's theatrical clubs in the 1940s.
He worked there in a number of capacities: scene painter,
actor of small parts, and eventually as theater manager, becoming
at the tender age of 21 the youngest theater manager
in London. But financial troubles forced the Boltons Theatre
to close in 1950. He then worked for a time in television,
helping found the first commercial TV station in England.
This led him back to the theater where, in 1954 at a
fundraising event, he met the chairman for the Catholic
Herald who invited him to take over the management of the
paper. He protested, saying that he knew nothing about running
a newspaper and was told in reply: "That may be a
very good start!" He then served as Managing Director of
the Catholic Herald for nearly 50 years.
Under his vision and guidance, the Catholic Herald
evolved from serving a small, closed constituency within
which the purchase of a copy was regarded as an act of piety
to become a national and international Catholic weekly
that appears on newsstands through the English-speaking
world. He recruited talented journalists from the secular
press and the Catholic Herald became a feisty and highly
sought-after newspaper. As publisher of a number of Catholic
newspapers both during and after Vatican II, he was
always able to have his newspapers walk that fine tightrope
between liberal and conservative ideologies. Invariably his
newspapers were considered too liberal for the conservatives
and too conservative for the liberals. Not a bad critique.
As a publisher with a very limited budget, Otto was
good at spotting talented young journalists, hiring them to
edit his newspapers, and then after a few years giving them
his fullest blessing as they moved on to more profitable jobs
within the secular press. In this way, he helped launch the
career of a number of very good young journalists; but it
was a win-win situation for both, the aspiring young editors
looking to make a start and for the Catholic press who benefited
from their talent. During his years in publishing he also
developed life-long friendships with leading church people
everywhere, including Archbishop Denis Hurley of South
Africa and Cardinal Franz Konig of Vienna.
I first met Otto in 1990, when he recruited me to
write a column for his newspapers and, in the twenty years
since, I have enjoyed a wonderful friendship with him and
his wife, Marie. Despite being humble and approachable,
he was always a little larger than life. He brought color into
a room. He loved life, loved work, deeply loved his wife,
and especially loved long, late-night dinners, stoked by
good wine, ecclesial talk, banter, humor, and friendship,
capped-off with good cigars. Time stopped during these
dinners, a glance at your wristwatch was forbidden, and
even though you paid a price for it in tiredness the next day,
you knew that, during those hours at table together, you
were doing what you are supposed to be doing your whole
life, just enjoying friendship, love, food, banter, and holy
talk together. I will always treasure memories of those dinners
in Otto's various clubs, as well as of a couple of all-day
drives through the English countryside in mid-summer, car
windows wide-open, pipe and cigar smoke wafting about,
and Otto's eyes surveying the landscape, checking it out for
its beauty and for the possibility of it containing a pub.
No community should botch its deaths! And so it's
important to highlight that in Otto Herschan's passing the
church and the world lost a true gentleman, a good
friend, a man of wit, and man who, like Jesus, tried
to draw people of very persuasion together around a
common table of friendship and faith.
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser.
Currently Father Rolheiser is serving as President of
the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be
contacted through his website-www.ronrolheiser.com.
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